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Apology to Flickr users 2007-09-03 01:21:27 Update: We did an emergency patch to our code to search for only Creative Commons licensed Flickr
images and to attribute the flickr user of the image selected. We’re still looking into how we can insert an attribution in the Myspace profile itself (this will take more time).
===
We’ve gotten several messages that our CoolChaser tool is enabling the copyright violation of Flickr users
. I now realize that we could have coded our tool to more specifically list only images of Flickr users that allow sharing and to properly attribute such users. This was on my todo list and I apologize for not implementing it sooner. I appreciate that some Flickr users have chosen the Creative Commons license to share their photos to varying degrees, and that Flickr actually does allow us to filter for only such photos. Thanks for bringing this issue to my attention. Rest assured this matter has my highest attention now, and we’re looking to fixing this in the next few days.
We’re l Read more:Apology
Featured Themes III 2007-08-25 22:00:45 OK, I couldn’t resist introducing more themes because the qualities are getting better and better everyday.
NY city at night theme by Μαℜκ [Im Home YAY]
One of the greatest city layouts I’ve seen! It uses a similar technique I used for the Gotham theme (ahem), the image is placed on the top and seamlessly continues to a black background rather than just repeating it over and over. Love it!
emo love theme by Living On the Edge
AWWWW, how cute is this emo love I like all the emo themes in general because I’m soooo emo too (is there an age limit to call youself emo? LOL) I really like the heart background and the black and white photos used.. very well composed!
psp3 theme by Snake Suderland
Snaaaake, it’s not over yet! (shouts Liquid Snake) Ok, I’m a huge Metal Gear fan but that’s not the only reason why I chose this theme. I mean, look at the details! Look at the headers! And all the unified greyish tone! It’s absolutely perfec Read more:Featured
Featured Themes II 2007-08-21 23:16:13 Heeeey people! Like I promised in my previous entry, I found some more cool themes so would like to introduce them to you guys.
pink bunny theme by *Kimberly* ~ Azreal’s mommy
*Kimberly* ~ Azreal’s mommy has made lots of other cool themes ranging from not only cute but to gothic and sexy (playboy) themes! Many of her themes use animated glitter images very effectively. I personally like this the best - it’s just perfect!
purple theme by ¤Mia¤ is baaack
Not just another purple theme! This beautiful theme by ¤Mia¤ is back works well with a variety of background images. Goth, cute, pinkish, stripes, skulls, socks, music, you name it! You can be really creative with this theme.
unique theme by andrea.[walligator]
As always, let me introduce a relatively new theme created by andrea.[walligator]. I always love to see people exploring with borders and this one totally wins! I tried combining it with a black and white photo of a subway and it worked really well Read more:Featured
BarCampBlock! 2007-08-17 23:05:48 Scott Rosenberg reminded me that BarCampBlock is happening this weekend. This is one my favourite unconferences. It’s a spontaneous gathering of geeks looking to share and learn from one another. I attended my first BarCamp two years ago, where it was held at the modest office of a neat startup. This year, it’s still held at those offices, but they’ve also infected the rest of the street block to join in - pretty amazing!
I’ll be showing off CoolChaser in one the lightning demos Sat. evening. If you’ll be in downtown Palo Alto, CA this Sat evening, please drop by and say hi.
Url.com: short downtime 2007-08-15 20:22:01 Update: deployment was success! Let us know if you see any glitches…
We’re upgrading url.com with speedier code and bug fixes. Url.com will be unavailable for under half an hour starting at 10pm PDT Aug 15th 2007.
Featured Themes! 2007-08-11 21:33:25 Well, it’s been 4 days since the release of our theme editor and we currently already have around 280 (including the original 12) public themes!! Now, that’s ALOT in just 4 days! I looked through all the themes and let me introduce some of the themes I personally thought were cool!
LipGloss2 theme by Heathaaa!
Heathaaa! has made so many beautiful themes including the most popular Static White (1951 layouts in 4 days!) but I personally LOVE this lipgloss theme because of its beautiful use of colors and the contact table image. Heathaaa! is also featured on our featured user page so go check it out!
Sepia Static by ~*LizardKitty*~ describes me best
~*LizardKitty*~ describes me best has also created lots of beautiful themes and look how artistic this Sepia Static theme is! The picture above is another version with a contact table created by Heathaaa! (thanks Heathaaa!), a collaboration of our two great CoolChasers!
Victorian by Taratata
OK I couldn’t resist intro Read more:Featured
Theme Editor is officially out! 2007-08-08 12:33:09 (Chao passes the microphone to Sachiko) Thanks Chao for the introduction The theme editor is officially out! (clap and applause sign held up) Thank you all for waiting and we are really happy to see that people are already going nuts and creating lots of themes already.
We are hoping you use this theme editor in any way you want! You can create fantastic themes for other users to use, or if you just want to tweak parts of the existing theme and use it all by yourself without sharing, no problem! If you don’t want it to appear on the layout editor or theme editor for others to see, just don’t enter the thumbnail url when saving it. Or, if you wanted to add a different contact table, network table to the existing themes to make it better, go ahead! Just want to tweak the fonts? No problemo! I remember a great man once said “when a user starts to use your application in a way you didn’t expect, that means you got a great product” (forgot who that great man Read more:Editor
, Theme
CoolChaser upgrade successful! 2007-08-08 00:45:40 The upgrade
went very smoothly. We got it done in less than 30 minutes, woot! However, let us know if you encounter any problems. Thanks!
Sachiko will fill us on the details of this new release tomorrow…
Major Update to CoolChaser - planned downtime 2007-08-06 20:40:32 CoolChaser will be offline on Aug 7th 10pm PDT for 1-2 hours as we push out a major new update to CoolChaser, including the Theme Editor Sachiko teased us about
Read more:Update
, Major
Cranky servers 2007-07-23 13:43:24 Update: Things seem back to normal again (whew!) Thanks for your patience - 1:15pm PDT July 23rd 2007
Sorry, our servers
are acting up today - you’re probably experiencing slowness or connection failures - please bear with us as we scramble to fix this.
You need more themes! 2007-07-17 23:48:26 As I wrote in my previous entry, one of the most common feedback we get is of course “you guys are great!” (who rolled your eyes?!) but the next most common feedback is “you need more themes
!”
Currently, I’m the only person creating the themes, and it’s kinda sucky that you are all stuck with my themes ei?
So, we have been working hard on releasing a yet another very cool editor, the Cool Theme Editor!
Here’s a sneak peek of our soon-to-be-released Theme Editor.
1. Is this to create a MySpace layout?
Not quite. It’s to create just the theme so it won’t come with a specific background. Users will combine the theme with a background of their own choice. It’s going to be a bit more complicated process than using our Layout Editor (although easier than any other MySpace layout editor!) so you need to have some design skills to create a theme that goes against a variety of backgrounds.
2. What’s in it for meee?
But aren&rs
Editor is fixed! 2007-06-27 22:57:18 UPDATE 6/28 5:46pm (Pacific Time): Hey guys, our scientist fixed the problem in like 1 minute from wherever he was (somewhere in the mountains but he just found out they had wifi :D) So the editor is fixed already! Let us know if you see anything weird and thanks for being so patient with us! Love you all~ xoxoxoxo
—–
Original Message:
MySpace changed it’s settings again so our auto insert is not working right now. Sorry guys! Our scientist is on vacation so can you wait for couple of days until he comes back?
Read more:Editor
Like Your Layout? 2007-06-25 19:40:32 We ask users “Like Your Layout?” at a certain point on the CoolChaser site. (you have to try it out to find out where if you still haven’t tried our site!) We started asking since March 21st and so far there were 49,150 (and counting!) comments!!
Initially our intention was to collect feedback from the users so we thought of asking “Comments?” or “Please Leave Feedback” but we didn’t want it to be too formal so decided to go with that rather unusual copy. (Inspired by “Got Milk?”)
Here are some of the comments that made us cry. (in no particular order)
WOW, just WOW. I cant believe it. It is ten-thousands times better now!!! - justin_crazybard
IT’S GREAT I WISH I KNEW OF THIS SITE SOONER I LOVE HOW U CAN MAKE UR OWN WITH OUT ALL THE EXTRA WORK - *~Keisha~*
yea dude this site is kool i like it cuz i find exactly wat i want here is stead of being mad by not finding wat the hhell i want to find bro… - Random Hero
How we “don’t” store your password 2007-06-21 15:14:52 Some people were concerned about providing their MySpace password to us when using our auto insert software. We DON’T store the MySpace password anywhere on our servers and we only use them to insert or undo your layout. The thing is, if you are a returning user, you can login to our site using your MySpace password to view your layout history. I hear some people saying “Heeey, wait a minute, you say you don’t store our passwords, but how are we still able to login to your site using them if you don’t keep them?”
Well let me explain how and it’s pretty straight forward.
When users enter their password to login to our site, we encrypt their password and match it against the encrypted version of the password that we do store on our servers. We have no ability to unencrypt the password, and as far as we know, neither does anybody else (except maybe NSA!). Thus, this is just to uniquely identify the user to show them their history and link them to th
We are not a phishing site!!!!!! 2007-06-15 15:41:00 We think MySpace is (wrongly and randomly) marking less than 1 out of 10 of our CoolChaser users as being phished.
Such users have gotten this message after trying out the auto insert.
We are not 100% sure if our auto insert is causing this message or if MySpace is under heavy phishing
attack right now. If it were us, it should happen to all of our users.. but why less than 1 out of 10?? Is MySpace tweaking with their algorithm and doing it randomly??
Well, we took this issue seriously and thought of shutting down the site for now, but then, we decided that it was even worse if we did that because then it would really look like we fled! So, we decided to just keep running the site and be open about the situation. We have nothing to hide, we are doing nothing wrong, and therefore, we are not going to run away but to tell you the truth about what is happening.
It really saddens us that in trying to help folks we are wrongly accused as phishers Who can we trust these days? Is it jus
Mysterious MySpace 2007-06-13 17:23:35 “Oh you are so mysterious, MySpace
! I woke up this morning and I noticed that you are playing around with the extended network.
I mean playing around because I don’t see it all the time, it’s sort of a hide a seek peek-a-boo~~~!! thing.
You never cease to surprise me MySpace “
…that was my love letter to MySpace. CoolChaser users, if you see this, it’s not our code, it’s MySpace’s. They might be implying that they will do this permanently later and giving us the heads up. We won’t deal with this yet directly but will see what MySpace is trying to do in the next, like, I don’t know, 5 hours or so.
UPDATE: I got a message back from Tom! (on the MySpace announcement box :D) He said…
“hey everyone. dont’ worry about that extended network box. you dont need to edit your profile to fix it. that was a mistake that we’re going to fix in the next few hours… your profiles will be back to normal, no wor
MySpace’s Tom explains captcha codes 2007-06-12 18:54:02 A month after wreaking havoc on our service, Tom finally explains the reason for the captcha codes. Since CoolChaser automatically inserts layouts, we have to ask our users to enter these so-called captcha codes. This is required by MySpace
and is meant to prevent evil phishers and spammers.
For those who are interested, Tom gives a good explanation for this minor annoyance. For the technically inclined, Google offers a more in-depth explanation.
New hardware for CoolChaser.com - Url.com next… 2007-06-11 14:57:20 Well, after much head bashing, CoolChaser.com is finally on multiple web servers. Let us know if things are still slow for you, and thank you very much for tolerating such sub-standard behavior. We’re working hard to make sure we stay ahead of the game in the future
Url.com users, once we iron the remaining kinks on CoolChaser, we’ll be apply the same architecture to Url.com too - stay tuned!
Use old.coolchaser.com for now 2007-06-09 20:41:31 Update: We’ve redirected all traffic back to our old server. So, feel free to use http://www.coolchaser.com again.
As you may have guessed, we’ve been updating our server architecture to a server farm. Unfortunately, things haven’t gone as expected (isn’t that expected?). For a speedier experience, go to http://old.coolchaser.com
Thanks for your patience!
More Options! (ready!) 2007-06-08 17:32:16 We are almost ready
to released some really cool options on our editor for you to tweak your layout even more!
Option 1 - You can tweak the position of your background
Not so excited? Well, I’ll assure you that you will be after you read on because lots of our users have asked for this option! Proves that we listen to our users huh??
I went to see the “Pirate of the Caribbean: at World’s End” the other day, and my butt hurt after sitting down for 3 hours but my eyes were in shape of hearts because of Orlando Bloom (heart icon here) So I decided to make a layout from that movie in 2 minutes!!
Here’s a tip if you want to make a layout from a movie. Type in “poster” after the movie title: in my case I typed in “at the world’s end poster.” This isn’t technically correct because I had “the” where I shouldn’t, but Google still gave me excellent results! Here is the layout I created initially.
OK, I might Read more:Options
Growing pains… 2007-05-28 21:02:43 Looks like we’re becoming a little too popular, which is a problem we are grateful to have. But please bear with the general sluggishness of the site - we are feverishly working on adding more hardware. Thanks for your patience!
Update: We’ll be adding a new database server tonight or tomorrow. Expect a short downtime (10-15 minutes) in the wee hours of the day (Pacific time).
Read more:Growing
What’s your homepage? 2007-05-05 01:00:21 Is it Google? Yahoo? MySpace? or Dell? (LOL) I’m really lazy and have never really changed the default home page that came with my browsers. My Safari (yes, I’m an Mac user so sorry for all the weirdness going on for people using Internet Explorer! :D) has Apple as a home page, and my Firefox has a Mozilla Google Page that looks like this.
I like the simpleness but it’s kinda boring huh? Well, we just released a really cool feature that lets you instantly have your own personalized home page with the background and theme you chose to create your MySpace layout!
For example, I’m a HUGE Naruto fan so I chose a Naruto background (searched for “Naruto wallpaper” because I get better quality images) and a Stationery theme to create a new MySpace page which turned out pretty nice
Once I create that layout, I see an option to create a home page based on that layout on my user page.
I click on it and Voila! I get to preview what the home page looks like
Reason behind MySpace new captchas - and why the Coolchaser ribbon has disappeared 2007-05-01 14:54:21 As users of CoolChaser, our new profile and blog layout editor, have known, MySpace
started adding captchas to profile editing, effectively preventing our auto insertion software from working for a few days last week.
I think I may have found a possible reason for MySpace’s recent actions and we want to warn our users about it. It looks like there’s a malicious MySpace malware floating around. It manifests itself as a huge invisible box, effectively floating on top of your profile. When a friend clicks on say a link in your profile, the invisible box (technically a huge invisible image link) is above the link and redirects your unsuspecting friend to a totally different website from the link.
We first came across these profiles “in the wild”, but have recreated it on this profile to study it better. You can see that MySpace has rewritten the invisible DIV’s link from http://www.dsadsaddd.br.gd/ to http://www….br.gd/.
MySpace has been silently, but I Read more:disappeared
, behind
, Reason
Dark Storm Passing: CoolChaser back up 2007-04-25 17:23:34 The past few days have been quite hellish for us, and I’m afraid you, our fair users of CoolChaser, have had to bear the brunt of it. I feel like a Lilliputian in the land of Giants at the mercy of the idiosyncrasies of MySpace.
It started with MySpace adding captchas to disallow software services from auto-updating user profiles. Since our service was entirely dependent on auto-updating profiles on behalf of our users, this certainly threw a spanner in our works. We’ve updated our tool, to show you the underlying messy codes that we automatically insert, just in case…
Then, our server crashed and we were down again last night, but fortunately we were able to restore a backup server fairly quickly.
I think my profile expresses how I feel today: a dark storm is passing by. Thankfully, things are back to normal (at least for now), and we’ve learnt a lot and made our software more robust to weather the next storm better (fingers crossed).
Read more:Storm
Descending into the world of messy codes :( 2007-04-24 14:50:50 As we discovered in our last post, MySpace is semi-randomly requiring captchas when you edit your profile. This has prevented our auto-layout-insertion software from working.
The good news is that we’re still limping along. We’ve just modified our site to show you the messy codes we were previously trying to hide from you (have a look, it’s ugly). You now have to copy the code we show you, log on to MySpace, click on the “edit profile” and paste it in your “about me” box, then “Save All Changes”. Phew! That’s a lot steps our software was doing automatically.
We’re preparing more detailed instructions on all these steps. Meanwhile, for the tech savvy among you, if you have a better idea for us to serve you better, write us a comment below.
Thanks for your patience!
Coolchaser down 2007-04-24 02:03:31 Well, it looks like MySpace is requiring users who want to edit their profiles to “prove they’re human” by an extra verification page such as the one below:
This prevents our auto-layout insertion code from working. In the next day or so, we’ll be reverting to publishing “myspace codes” that users can manually paste to edit their profiles. But in the mean time, I’m sorry to say the service is down Thanks again for your patience and being such wonderful users.
MySpace flakiness 2007-04-23 20:30:51 It looks like MySpace
is changing lots of their settings today so our editor might not work properly for some people Scientists are working hard on this. Thanks for your patience.
Update: Looks like things are working now but it seems like MySpace is still being slammed with traffic and reporting occasional timeouts and errors. You may have to try a few times before you can successfully create a new layout. Please leave your comments below if you run into problems even after multiple tries.
Thanks for your patience!
New! Now with a matching blog! 2007-04-21 01:02:41 Lots of MySpace users had to suffer from having a granny-pantie-looking blog that doesn’t match their cool push-up-bra looking profile for a long long time.
To refresh your memory, here is the default blog layout.
…. Yeah that’s pretty granny looking alright. Well good news people! We just released a new awesome feature that NONE of the other tons of MySpace layout sites do. Now we update the blog layout that has a matching background and theme as your profile layout ALL AT THE SAME TIME!
Here are some of our demo profiles that we updated to show you how fantastic they look!!
Grunge theme layout with matching blog
Butterfly theme layout with matching blog
Sparkle theme layout with matching blog
Tattoo theme layout with matching blog
Plain white theme layout with matching blog
Postcard theme layout with matching blog
Gotham theme layout with …. well you got the idea.
So grab a matching blog and show it off to your friends. I’ve seen tons and tons
My Background Not Showing! 2007-04-10 20:01:09 As I blogged in the last post, people seem to be pretty happy about their layouts. Thanks for all the luv and we luv all of ya guys too! xoxoxo!
Anyways, among all the comments we’ve been receiving, we seem to get comments here and there saying “I changed my layout but it’s not showing” or simply “my background is not showing.”
UPDATE: Notes to visitors from URL.com and ClipClip.org. This blog entry is for our MySpace Layout Editor CoolChaser. Make sure to try out CoolChaser before asking questions about how to update your MySpace profile
Back to the topic, I actually had the same shocking experience that when I logged in, the layout was gone.
… Actually, the layout was not gone, I was just looking at my MySpace user homepage.
This is how the user homepage look (the page that you land after you login) vs your profile page look (the page that all your friends see)
Their contents are pretty much different but doesn’t it somehow give you
More Themes! 2007-04-03 19:54:40 UPDATE: I’ve created some real MySpace demo profiles to showcase the new themes. Add them as your friend (I will check these accounts once a month :P)
It’s been a month or so since we opened CoolChaser to the public and it seems like people are liking it. Anyway, among all the compliments (teehee) some users have asked us for more themes. Like 6 themes are not enough!
Before getting into the new themes, here is a list of the original 6 themes (and the number of layouts that were created using them). as of 4:33pm pacific time 4/3/07.
1) Grunge (6919)
2) Butterfly (5971)
3) Pop (2582)
4) Stationery (1619)
5) Industrial (3263)
6) Sparkle (14623 - holy cow!)
So what can we say about this data people? Well one thing for sure, people are lovin’ the sparkles! Let the animated gif rule MySpace! Natually, when I thought of what new themes to make, I knew that I had to make one that has an animate gif as a background.
Thus the new theme “Gotham” was born. This was
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